What You Should Know About Media

Hello Everyone,
in the recent spate of events with regards to the City Harvest Church [CHC] saga, I have realised that there are so many people whom are simply blinded and whom are not using their brains to think critically about the reports that were published online and offline.

First and foremost, what the media publishes/releases can be a one-sided point of view and most of the time, these reports can be bias and very often, taken out of context so as to sensationalise the whole story. Well, I bet that most people never really did bother to find out information about the reporter/journalist who reported/wrote the articles. Most of the time, people would just read the headlines, the contents of it, and then go around discussing the content with other people. What some people never really bothered to do is to think about why the article was written in such a manner by the reporter/journalist and what the article aims to achieve.

The truth of the matter is this, every company in the world of business is out to make a profit [whether its food and beverage, technology, media, and etc.]. If a company isn't making money, investors will perhaps be rather reluctant to invest their money into the company. Hence, a company in order to generate profits would go all the way [sometimes ignoring ethics and corporate social responsibility] to create value for its stakeholders. The same goes for the media industry. The more an article is able to generate buzz, gossips, and rumours, the more it has achieve its intent of creating attention.

Take for example the most recent case between Singapore Press Holdings [SPH] and SMRT regarding the fake photo that was published. The photograph that a content producer of citizen journalism website Stomp posted online, supposedly of an MRT train running with one set of its doors open, was found to be false and the worst thing was, the photo has already been published on the papers! This certainly implies that before even SMRT has a chance to respond to the matter, SPH has already passed its judgements to stir up even more emotions amongst citizens that SMRT was not effective in providing a safe environment for commuters.

Back in those days when I was still in school, I will always remember my English teacher telling us to pen down our articles objectively and I also recall my humanities teacher showing us a few photographs and asking us what we could infer from the photographs shown. Yet, many of us do not appreciate or even understand the skills that our teachers were trying to impart to us. You see, most of the time, what we see/hear/read are often information that have already been twisted and filtered. Information that are being presented to us are usually on the surface and they do not dwell any deeper than that. And most of the time, people only tell us things/information that we only want to hear/listen to.

Wouldn't it be good if we develop a healthy dose of skepticism and discern for ourselves the facts and data of a subject/topic before engaging in sweeping statements?

Well, in any case. The media can be manipulated in many ways and I hope people will know the truth about the media. To understand more about media manipulation/media distraction, check out the Wikipedia article in the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_distraction and make sure you do your own research regarding media manipulation to understand the whole context of what media manipulation is all about.